Damage sustained by storm Sunday, March 31

So, what happened?

On April 2, 2006, an unusual storm approached the city from the north with tornadic winds that directly hit the historic Mullanphy Emigrant Home. The south wall of the building collapsed above the first floor. Swift action by concerned preservationists and neighbors stopped an emergency demolition order and led to the purchase of the building by the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group (ONSLRG) in November 2006.

Having successfully rescued several 100-year-old buildings with missing walls as part of the C.O.N.E.C.T. project, ONSLRG began to work on a plan. ONSLRG created the Historic Mullanphy Alliance to spearhead fundraising efforts and coordinate the coalition of civic groups who want to see the building restored.

Unfortunately, on March 31, 2007, a second round of tornadic winds left the building further compromised as the east and north walls endured masonry collapses. Thankfully, earlier stabilization work by contractor E.M. Harris gave the building enough stability to survive this weather onslaught.

With the support and encouragement of the St Louis community, including Missouri Preservation, Landmarks Association of St. Louis and many individual donors, including the professional support of the law firm of Bryan Cave, contractor E.M. Harris, and architects Rosemann and Associates, we are forging ahead with plans to rebuild our south-end-of-old-north landmark.

The structural engineers and masons estimate it will cost $350,000 to rebuild the walls. If you want to lend a hand, contact the office at 314-241-5031 to volunteer time or material. If you want to buy us some bricks, call us, click on Paypal or send tax-deductible donations to Mullanphy, c/o Old North St Louis Restoration Group, 2800 N 14th St, St Louis, MO 63107.

Mullanphy Original Facade, Missouri's Contribution
to American Architecture by J.A. Bryan, 1928.

Why save this building?

The Mullanphy building is the anchor for the Mullanphy National Historic District at the southern end of Old North St. Louis, just north of downtown.

The Mullanphy building was erected in 1867 as the physical location for the Mullanphy Traveller's Aid Fund. During the last decades of the 1800s, the city's population exploded with the westward migration honored by our beautiful Arch, also known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Immigrants came to St. Louis in droves from Bohemia, Germany and Ireland, starting in about 1840. Census records show that St. Louis grew from around 20,000 residents in 1840 to nearly 160,000 by 1860. Some immigrants continued westward, but many decided to find their journey's end here and call St Louis home. Many of those who stayed moved to the near northside and built tight, ethnically centered communities.

The building was designed by prominent Midwestern architects George I. Barnett and Alfred Piquenard. The team had in 1865 just finished the Pike County Courthouse when they got the Mullanphy commission. Barnett was perhaps the most prominent St. Louis architect of the day, noted for a wide range of designs including hotels, residences, office buildings and churches. Barnett's most famous remaining local works are Henry Shaw's Tower Grove house (1849) and the Grand Avenue Water Tower (1871). Piquenard would later design both the Iowa and Illinois State capitols, while Barnett received the commssission for the Missouri Governor's Mansion in 1871.

The Italianate style is consciously historical, or "picturesque", using the architectural vocabulary of 15th C. Italian Renaissance. The Mullanphy building is one of only two Italianate-style civic buildings left in the city of St. Louis. Michael R. Allen, presents a writeup of the building on his Ecology of Absence site: "The style was highly popular for schools and hospitals at the time of the building's construction, but remaining examples are few. The State Hospital (formerly the County Insane Asylum), built in 1869 by plans by William Rumbold, is the only other example of an institutional Italianate style left in the city."

In 1877, the last will and testament of Bryan Mullanphy, which established the Mullanphy Fund, was challenged in the courts yet again. In an interesting move, the court upheld the city's inheritance, but stipulated that the Fund could not be used to improve or maintain a building, but had to be spent in cash on the immigrants or travellers in the form of a stipend. The building still belonged to the city, but was put to use as Douglas School in 1879.

In 1900, the Absorene company bought the building and made "modernizing" alterations, including removing the architecturally significant curved cornice and cupola and covering the north side of the facade with a flat-faced stairwell addition. The company also filled in the large central arched window, marking in glazed brick the initials HRH for company president H.R. Henderson. The Absorene company is still going strong in North St Louis, is still located on Cass Avenue. Later uses included furniture storage and a motorcycle repair shop. The building is now owned by the Old North St Louis Restoration Group.

City view from inside the building

The City Context

The Mullanphy Emigrant Home anchors the Mullanphy National Historic District at the south end of the Old North St. Louis neighborhood. The Mullanphy district is the last vestige of the Kerry Patch, a well-remembered Irish neighborhood famous for taverns, gangs, brawls and a fierce sense of community. The district also is a pivotal connection between downtown St. Louis, several blocks to the south, and the rejuvenation in Old North.

The Kerry Patch was once an immigrant stronghold between downtown and the once-independent village of North St Louis, which had just been annexed by the city in 1841. As St Louis lost population after WWII, the rest of the Patch was eventually made over into public housing and an industrial area. However, recent urban development patterns suggest this north edge of downtown will experience rapid changes for the better in the next few years.

The Emigrant Home is just a few blocks south of the 14th Street Mall project, a multi-million dollar mixed-use rehabilitation project projected for completion in 2009. The Mullanphy building is on the ONSL History Trail, part of the Confluence Greenway which leads down to the Mississippi via the St Louis Riverfront Trail.

Where the neighborhood meets the city and West Florissant turns into Tucker, city planners expect a mixed-use zone. The single-family homes standing next to the Mullanphy building will give way to commercial and office space heading down Tucker. Any developer of the Mullanphy building has many options.

The Weeping Ghost of Bryan Mullanphy
D.R. Fitzpatrick for the St. Louis Post Dispatch

Who was Bryan Mullanphy?

All his oddities are but as dust in the balance when weighed against the uprightness of his life and the succession of his charities.

-- A Resolution of the St. Louis Bar Association upon the 100-Year Anniversary of the Death of Bryan Mullanphy in June, 1951

Bryan Mullanphy was born in 1809 to a very wealthy St Louis family of Irish immigrants. Bryan's father, John Mullanphy, became fabulously wealthy by cornering the cotton market during the War of 1812, and is often called America's first millionaire. Bryan was sent to England for education at Stonyhurst in 1825, where at the age of 15 he established a collection of Native American artifacts which remains a draw at the British Museum today. Bryan returned to St Louis, and was one of the earliest students at St Louis University High School in 1829. Bryan maintained strong ties to the Jesuit community, including a long friendship with Pierre-Jean de Smet, the famous missionary. Bryan served as an alderman in 1835-36, a circuit court judge in 1840-44, and finally as the 12th Mayor of St Louis in 1847-48.

Bryan was always a colorful fellow, interested in travel, exploration and helping immigrants. He was known to greet weary travellers disembarking at Laclede's Landing with gifts of cash and fresh razors. In another famous anecdote, he bought a cow for a poor woman so that she could support her family. He was a founding member of the St Vincent de Paul Society in St Louis in 1845. The Mullanphy family had a soft spot for society's outcasts, with John, Bryan and sister Ann establishing homes for orphans, fallen women, and the city's first hospital at 4th and Spruce, run by the Sisters of Charity.

Despite all this success, Bryan had a falling-out with his father around 1830 and was disinherited. It seems likely that this family rupture stemmed from the onset of his mental illness, which often appears in the sufferer's early 20's. As his career progressed, Bryan's eccentricities became a matter of common knowledge. He was said to sometimes wear a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other. Other symptoms were a fluctuating equilibrium, periods of acting like a pillar of the community mixed with periods of dementia, days of unchanged shirts, and a reputation for odd behavior.

Bryan never married. At his father's death in 1833, although he had been disinherited, his sisters passed along a significant portion of the family wealth. He was the first bachelor mayor, an unusual condition in an era when most adults married as a matter of course.

As a judge, Bryan presided over at least one famous emancipation case, of 14-year-old Lucy A. Delaney, and his sympathetic rulings helped an African-American teenager gain her freedom a good 20 years prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. As a Democratic mayor, he oversaw the rush of westward expansion due to the Gold Rush, when thousands arrived in St Louis and prepared to go west to find their fortunes.

As an Irish Catholic, he combated the rise of the violent "Know-Nothings", a rabid anti-immigration party. During Bryan's mayoral term, St Louis was beset by episodes of the deadly cholera virus, which became a full-blown epidemic in 1849, eventually claiming his life as well. Mayor Bryan was instrumental in bringing modern sanitation efforts to combat cholera in a populous city.

After serving his term as mayor, Bryan's mental condition worsened, and he was twice involuntarily committed to Mullanphy Hospital, which had been founded by his father. During one commitment, he entertained the legal community by suing for his freedom in the Court of Common Pleas. But by the summer 1849, around his 40th birthday, he was out and about again, famously writing his will on a scrap of paper (some say a tablecloth) at a downtown saloon. At the age of 42, he contracted cholera and died shortly thereafter, on Sunday, June 15, 1851. He is buried at Calvary Cemetery. He was so well remembered by the legal community that on May 31, 1951, the Bar Association of St Louis held centennial ceremonies commemorating his passing.

In the famous will, Bryan left two-thirds of his estate to family, and the final third to the city of St Louis as: "a fund to furnish relief to all poor emigrants and travelers coming to St. Louis, on their way, bona fide to settle in the West." This controversial bequest was contested five times, the last in 1934. After the family lost the first 1860 case, the Mullanphy land in what is now Walnut Park was divided so that the city could inherit the one-third part, then worth $500,000. From this sum, the Mullanphy fund was endowed and the Emigrant Home built in 1867. The family also lost the second 1877 case, but the court ruled that the fund could not be used to support a building, but only to provide a stipend to travellers. Thus, in 1879, the city put the home to use as school.

In the 1930's, the fund fell on hard times, as the city was said to have raided the fund to provide operating costs during the Great Depression. This sparked the 1934 lawsuit, and inspired D.R Fitzpatrick, famed Post-Dispatch political cartoonist, to draw "The Weeping Ghost of Bryan Mullanphy", showing a sad ghost reading a record of depleted Traveller's Aid Fund accounts written on the northeast facade of the Mullanphy Emigrant Home.

Bryan Mullanphy's endowment of the Travellers Aid fund proved to be a lasting legacy of his personality to the city and the world. The city's fund is still posting $100,000 in annual income and handling about 100 needy cases a month. The initial endowment also kicked off a world-wide movement, the International Traveler's Aid Society, which aids some 4 million people each year, simply providing an information desk at airports or reunifying separated family members. In 2005, Travelers Aid assisted thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims throughout the region.

Crews from E.M. Harris install temporary supports,
January 2007

Wall Raising in Old North

We urgently need to get the walls closed up to buy time while we find a partner and put a fully-funded redevelopment project together. We have an excellent contractor and project management team lined up.

Our structural engineers and contractors estimate it will cost $150,000 to rebuild this wall. The two-wythe-thick crumbled south wall and a few other areas of damage will require approximately 30,000 bricks to repair. This works out to about $5.00 per brick, as follows:

$5 for each of 3360 single bricks in the pediment
$25 for each of 94 in-dentils in the lower cornice
$50 for each of 95 out-dentils in the lower cornice
$75 for each of 32 short quoins
$100 for each of 32 long quoins
$250 for each of 98 single-wythe courses interrupted by windows
$500 for each of 75 double-wythe courses interrupted by windows
$750 for each of 60 uninterrupted double-wythe courses
$1000 for each of 12 decorative window surrounds with archivolts

Please consider donating a brick today! To make a tax-deductible donation, use the Paypal link above, contact the office at 314-241-5031, or send tax-deductible donations to:

Mullanphy LLC
c/o Old North St Louis Restoration Group
2800 N 14th St
St Louis, MO 63107